October 1973: the great wave passes the county by

Fall 1973, peaking 9 October

The state record: Blue Book had been closed four years when the largest sighting wave of the 1970s crossed the country in the fall of 1973, and Indiana's documented share of it is dated precisely: on 9 October 1973, by the Mutual UFO Network of Indiana's account as the Stacker state survey carries it, first-responder switchboards across the state were overwhelmed by nearly 700 calls reporting UFO sightings — blinking lights near the ground, an object watched through a telescope by astronomy students, and irregular activity on a radar screen at a Fort Wayne airfield. The wave's press-documented Indiana center, in the record, was Muncie: Indiana Public Media's account, drawn from the Muncie papers and the Delaware County Historical Society, records hundreds of reports in Muncie and Delaware County through October 1973 — about a hundred calls to the Muncie police alone, more to the sheriff — with the intersection of Wheeling Avenue and McGaillard Road a repeated location, and, by 9 November, a Dairy Queen advertisement in the local paper joking that the UFOs had landed at its north store. East-central Indiana produced the wave's strangest Indiana documents as well: the Hartford City reports of 22–23 October 1973, investigated by the APRO organization's field man Donald Worley, shared the front page of the September–October 1973 APRO Bulletin with the Pascagoula and Coyne helicopter cases, and entered the Center for UFO Studies' catalogue of physical-trace cases for the impressions found in a cornfield the next day.

Mishawaka's share: None that the record reached carries. No Mishawaka case from the fall of 1973 appears in any source swept for this section — not in the APRO record, not in the state accounts, not in the wave literature; the same is true of South Bend, whose file states the identical negative. The entry prints it at its true size: when Indiana's skies filled in October 1973, the reporting that the record preserves ran through Muncie, Hartford City and the state's switchboards generally, and this city — which a generation earlier had stood inside a newspaper's organized sky watch — left no documented report in the wave's paper trail.

Sources:

1. Stacker, "States with the most UFO sightings" (state entry for Indiana, from National UFO Reporting Center data) — the 9 October 1973 switchboard peak of nearly 700 calls statewide, as the account of the Mutual UFO Network of Indiana gives it, including the Fort Wayne airfield radar item.
2. "Close Encounters of the Muncie Kind: The Muncie UFO Mania of 1973," Indiana Public Media, 27 April 2026 — the Muncie and Delaware County reporting of October 1973, the police and sheriff call volumes, the Wheeling and McGaillard location, the 9 November 1973 Dairy Queen advertisement; drawn from the Muncie newspapers and the Delaware County Historical Society.
3. Charles Lear, "A 1973 Humanoid Case From Indiana," Podcast UFO — the Hartford City reports of 22 October 1973, the APRO Bulletin's front page, and the case's entry in Ted Phillips (ed. Mimi Hynek), Physical Traces Associated with UFO Sightings: A Preliminary Catalogue, Center for UFO Studies, 1975, p. 95; and David F. Webb, 1973 — Year of the Humanoids, Center for UFO Studies, 1976.